L.D. 2, I John 1:5-2:11 "The Passing Darkness" Scott Hoezee

Generally I don't like to make predictions, but today I'll risk a bit of prognosticating. In this election year, I predict two things will happen. One is that the religious faith of the candidates will continue to be an issue. Whether the candidate is someone who thinks Job is in the New Testament or someone who claims Jesus as his favorite philosopher, where the candidates stand on faith will stay on the political radar scope.

But secondly I will venture that in and through whatever religious rhetoric we hear, probably no candidate will talk much about his sin. We may hear about faith-based initiatives, church attendance, or religion's impact on policy, but talk of sin is unlikely to crop up. Recently I have been reading Robert Dallek's new book on John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life. As someone born in 1964, I am amazed what a huge issue JFK's Roman Catholicism was in the 1960 election. No presidential race in the twentieth century was more dominated by a religious theme than that one. But even then issues related to sin did not come up.

But according to the Catechism, we can't even get started in talking about faith unless we deal first with sin. Last Sunday I said that comfort is not a wispy concept. Comfort as the Catechism defines it needs to be active and strong precisely because lasting comfort can emerge only from a fierce confrontation with sin. Our only comfort in life and in death needs to be bold and audacious, willing to talk tough about the sinfulness inside each of us.

Now we enter the Catechism's briefest section called "Misery." This is the diagnosis part where our spiritual doctor gives us the lab results we have been anxiously awaiting to tell us what's wrong. This is also the part where the doctor says, "I'm afraid I have some bad news." Nobody likes to hear they're sick and yet an accurate diagnosis is also the first step toward effective treatment. A doctor friend of mine has often said that the one thing you never want to be is what doctors call "an interesting case"! No one wants to be a medical mystery. If we could just know what is wrong with us, discover once and for all what bring us misery in life, then maybe we could be directed toward a cure.

The Catechism claims that what ails us is sin. Further, it establishes the reality of our sin by diagnosing our worst flaw: our failure to love. The first and great commandment is to love God with everything we've got and to then love also everyone around us. Love is what we were created for. Therefore, nothing reveals how far we have fallen from creation's intended plan than the fact that we struggle to be loving on a consistent basis.

The Apostle John agrees. Like the Catechism, John is very clear that love is the key indicator when it comes to diagnosing sin. It's striking how generic John is in these verses. Sin is a big category that encompasses a variety of behaviors you could list. Sin is stealing a candy bar from Rite Aid. Sin is being sexual with someone to whom you are not married. Sin is over-indulging in food or alcohol. Sin is telling a lie to cover up your own deviousness. Sin is gossiping about someone in order to bring him or her down a few pegs. Sin is the angry outburst that leads a man to raise his fist against his children.

As a preacher, I try to be specific in my sermons. Very often the difference between an engaging sermon and one that seems a bit dry lies precisely in the vividness of the examples. Yet John manages to write a great deal about sin yet without getting much more specific than drawing a contrast between love and hate. And even that contrast never gets down to brass tacks. John does not give us an example of precisely what a loving act might look like. But apparently to his mind it was enough to lay out these broad parameters, leaving it up to his readers to fill in the blanks with examples from their day-to-day lives.

John invites us to do that through what has become a very famous line. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." That verse has become probably the most common lead-in ever for the confession of sin portion in church services. But familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a bland acceptance of that verse. But let's think about it for a moment. After all, just who are these people who say they have no sin?

Even though we also have read I John 1 often in our own church services, I think it's safe to allege that denial of sinfulness has not been a hallmark of us Reformed folks! If anything, we have gone too far the other way. Years ago Lewis Smedes commented on what great spiritual catastrophizers we can be. We're not content to say merely that we made a mistake. Instead we take any single failure and hang it like a millstone around our necks.

As Smedes wrote, "When I get into this joyless abyss, my demon speaks to me in King James English: 'Oh thou feckless fop of a man, surely there is no spark of spiritual strength in thee. Fie on thee, fatuous wretch! For such a worm as thou there is no hope." More recently a psychiatrist from Grand Rapids has written that what afflicts a great many people in our Western Michigan neck of the woods is the despair that comes from an overdose of depravity rhetoric. Our tradition, this man wrote, has a fatal combination of the lofty expectations of pietism and the low self-regard that comes from focusing on total depravity. We set our sights high but then refuse to lift our eyes from the ground.

So given the tradition in which some of us have grown up, what sense does it make to read I John 1 here in church? Who here is denying that he or she is a sinner? Who here has ever been so filled with spiritual optimism as to fit into the designation of those who say they have no sin? We don't often feel like that, so does this verse not apply to us? No, it applies all right. But the key is to define sin the right way. Sometimes it's easy to affirm sin in general but never really admit what your particular sins are.

You can see the same thing in society. Most people sense there is a difference between right and wrong, and they may even be willing to call wrong acts sinful. People in and out of the church were horrified by the extent of the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. That was a sin, and few doubt it. Few people have anything but disgust over the shenanigans that have gone on at places like Enron and WorldCom. And even in a place as secular as New York City, you could find near unanimity of opinion that what happened at the World Trade Center that Tuesday in September came from sinful, evil people.

So very few people claim there is no such thing as sin. But that is not John's point. The self-deception John flags is the one that comes when we say that there is no sin in us. Maybe we restrict the definition of a sin to really big things like murder, rape, or terrorism. Or, seeing as we can usually come up with an explanation for our own actions, maybe we excuse in our own lives the same thing we regard as sinful when somebody else does it. The point is there are lots of ways to claim to be without sin. John would say that such an attitude is the result of having the wrong definition of sin. The right definition will nail us all and that definition involves love. Love is the measuring stick against which we size ourselves up. But we forget this and this moral amnesia can lead to all manner of confusion.

In his novel Continental Drift Russell Banks captures nicely the moral malaise of a lot of people. The novel's main character is a man named Bob, and Banks describes Bob this way. "Bob finds it difficult to know right from wrong. He relies on taboos and circumstances to make him a 'good man,' but he doesn't know if he has been a good man or merely a stupid or scared man. Most people like Bob, unchurched since childhood, now and then reach that point of not knowing whether they've been good, bad, stupid, or scared, and the anxiety this provokes obliges them to cease wondering as soon as possible. They bury the question the way a dog buries a bone, marking the spot and promising to themselves that they will return to the bone later when they have time and energy to gnaw on it. This is a promise that is never kept, of course, and rarely was is it ever meant to be kept."

People just aren't sure what to make of themselves but that is because they lack a reliable measuring device. Both John and the Catechism say love is the measure we need. If you love God above all and then love people, too, then you are walking with Jesus. If you are not loving, then you show yourself to be a sinner after all.

But really, is it helpful to measure sin by way of love? Does this clear things up or make them more murky? If you are trying to tell someone who knows no German what the German word Sagenhaft means, it won't help to say, "Sagenhaft is kind of like the German word Hervorragend." So also if you are trying to figure out what sin is, it may at first seem unhelpful to say that sin's opposite is love because love can be as difficult to define as sin. So isn't John just substituting one difficult word for another?

No, because I suspect we all know it's not that difficult to tell the difference between a loving attitude and a hateful one. Loving God means loving the way God made this creation in the first place. Love means fitting ourselves into God's designs rather than molding the world into something that is convenient for us by forever bending or ignoring the rules God has given. If you take the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation, there can be little doubting the picture it sketches. We are taught that each person is an image of no less than God himself. Love for that divine likeness means in no way diminishing another person. You do not steal from that person, you do not lay a finger of violence on that person, you do not lie to that person. If the other in your midst is sad, you find out why and see how you can help. If the other in your midst is happy, you find out why and then celebrate with her. If your neighbor lacks something--food, money, shelter--you do what you can to provide what is missing.

Yet we all know that simple as all that sounds, we none of us live up to it in a very consistent way. We find ways to avoid knowing about the deficits in our neighbors' lives so we can claim ignorance later on. We see poor and homeless people but we construct elaborate theories that explain how this poverty is all their fault, thus excusing us from any obligation to bail them out. We hear about another person's joy and we become upset that this joy is not our own. We hear about the sorrow of another person but are too concerned with the state of our own lives to muster the energy to take on another person's burdens. Indeed, we just generally find it pretty easy to be preoccupied with ourselves at the expense of thinking about others. We manage to avoid love by avoiding also the truth.

In I John 1 and 2 you may have noticed the link John establishes between love and truth. As Oliver O'Donovan has wonderfully pointed out, that is because love and truth go together. Love involves the truthful admission of who your neighbor is. Your neighbor is God's image, God's representative to you at any given moment. Jesus' summary commandment that you love your neighbor as yourself is stated that way because love erases the distinction between your neighbor and yourself. In radical empathy you extend yourself into your neighbor and so admit that she values her life, he wants joy in his heart, every bit as much as you value your own life, every bit as much as you want joy in your own heart.

Love reminds us that no matter how different the color of another's skin, no matter how different another's life experience has been, no matter any of the scores of differences you could seize on to put some daylight between yourself and this other person, in the end you are both imagebearers of the one same God. You love your neighbor as yourself because love is truthful enough to see that your neighbor is yourself. Everything that you despise in life--being lied to, being cheated on, being stolen from, being gossiped about behind your back--everything you despise, your neighbor despises. Your job in loving that neighbor, therefore, is to make sure you don't let those things happen to your neighbor.

And let's not for one moment underestimate the significance of this. Because in I John 2:8 John writes something that I find to be nothing short of startlingly beautiful and theologically profound. John, of course, loved contrasting imagery. Light and darkness was his favorite contrasting pair--he even began his gospel with it. Through Jesus the entire universe turned the corner from darkness into light. That's a pretty big, global, literally cosmic image. But John makes it a strikingly local phenomenon in chapter 2:8 when he says that for those who live in love, "the darkness is passing." The darkness is passing.

Those of you who have seen the film versions of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings can recall that as these three movies progress and as the evil Lord Sauron increases his power in the East, ever-darkening clouds begin to envelope all of Middle Earth. Finally it gets to the point where everything is dark, and sunny days spent in lushly green forests seem like a distant memory. But then near the end of the last movie the evil one is destroyed and the clouds begin to break. The main character of Frodo, however, faints from exhaustion, and in the movie this is depicted as a complete fading to black on the screen.

But when Frodo awakes some days later, he is in a nice bed with clean sheets. The first person he sees is the wizard Gandalf, and for the first time since the very earliest scenes in the three films, Gandalf opens his mouth and laughs. And as Gandalf laughs, sunlight streams in the windows. Then Frodo's friends gather around in the new brightness and as they stand in the light, they laugh and they laugh and they laugh. It reminds me of Psalm 126 when the captives return to Jerusalem from Babylon. "When we returned to Jerusalem, we were like men who dreamed, and our mouths were filled with laughter!"

When the darkness of sin passes and the light of love shines through Christ Jesus the Lord, joyful laughter is summoned from us. The ultimate and final dawning of that light is a ways off yet, of course. For now the darkness persists in so many hearts and in so many corners of our world. But what is arresting about I John 2 is that John says that every time we perform acts of love, the darkness passes a little bit more. Every act of Christ-inspired charity; every time we manage to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice because we love them; every time we build another person up by providing for her needs or by speaking words meant to buoy his spirits--in every loving instance like that the darkness of this world passes a little bit more and holy light seeps in around the edges of our hearts. The darkness passes when we love God and one another. Love is like a glorious and much-longed-for sunrise after a long and frightening and ever-so-dark night.

But the place to begin in pursuing that light is by measuring ourselves against the standard of love. We then accept the diagnosis that on our own we are often sinfully unloving people. This then leads us to abandon ourselves to the only One who can relieve us of our misery, and that is Christ Jesus the Lord--the very One who said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."

Too often even in the church obedience to rules is depicted as a dull and drear and burdensome task that clips our wings, restricts our freedom, and so chokes life of fun. But we know better. What we need to declare to the world is this: "Following the will of God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is not a dim and difficult task. When we do this, we are hastening the dawn, making the darkness pass, and shining forth ever-brighter glimmers of creation's first light, the light of love in which and for which we each of us was made!" The darkness is passing! Hallelujah and Amen!